Friday, December 2, 2016

Nigel Cox on Kinky Friedman

The 102nd in this occasional series of reprints from Quote Unquote the magazine is from the June
1994 issue. The intro read:

Kinky Friedman introduced the Frisbee to Borneo, where he
ate raw monkey brains. He made his name as a country singer in the 70s with his
band the Texas Jewboys and songs like “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your
Buns in the Bed”. Now he’s a bestselling author of six wise-cracking mystery
novels featuring a former country singer called Kinky Friedman who, like the
author, keeps his cigars in a bust of Sherlock Holmes. He recently toured here
with Rita Jo Thompson, Miss Texas 1987, and told Nigel Cox, “Course, in Texas
we consider anyone a homosexual who likes girls better than football.”

WRITE ’EM, COWBOY

QU: How come you’re called Kinky?

KF: My real name is Richard Kinky Big Dick Friedman, you can
just call me Dick, if you like. Kinky came basically from my moss, which before
I got my most recent haircut looked like a Lyle Lovett starter kit — moss being
hair.

QU: And are there a lot of Jews in Texas?

KF: They’re kind of like leprechauns, there’s actually a
bunch of us, but it’s hard to pick out who they are because Jews tend to — it’s
like a survival thing, like a chameleon — get very much like the kind of people
that they’re living around. The Jews in Texas would just be these big guys with
the pickup trucks, you know, and the gun racks and everything else.

QU: One wouldn’t normally ask that, it’s just that you’re a
very Jewish Jew.

KF: Well I’m not a religious Jew. I’m not a religious
person. I believe in Tom Paine’s credo “The world is my country, to do good is
my religion”, being serious for just a small moment in time there. But being
Jewish in Texas is interesting, because you can pass for a Texan if you want. I
think both have this in common, they’re both independent-minded kind of
peoples, and both are vanishing breeds, at least the Jew and the cowboy are, I
would say. And I also like the way that they stand a little bit apart from
people, from the world as a whole, look at things from the outside in, which is
probably the most important thing I’ve learned from being a Jew. It’s real
helpful as a writer, gives you a kind of interesting slant, that a member of
the country club might not have.

QU: Texas has a wonderful musical heritage, but you wouldn’t
necessarily think of Texas as the home of country music.

KF: I think Hollywood is what did it. Even though the movies
were shot in Hollywood they all appeared to be emanating from Texas. By the
time Anne Frank found out about the cowboy, it was Texas, and that’s why she
had pictures of cowboy stars on her wall in her secret annex. The cowboy has
reached a lot further than he ever dreamed, thrown his lasso to the sky quite a
ways, to have captured the imagination of children all over the world. Texas
means something. Texas is a very progressive state and a very primitive state,
simultaneously. Makes it very, very interesting. A lot of wide open spaces, in
general and between people’s ears, and out of that sometimes comes a creative
thought, an original thought.

QU: Who’s your favourite Texan?

KF: Jack Ruby, the guy that killed Oswald. He was a very
glamorous, ﬂamboyant type, he was the first Texas Jewboy I would say, and he
kinda got a bad shake. People don’t realise, Jack Ruby was one of Hank
Williams’ last friends on Earth. Although Hank had the biggest funeral in the
world — both of his wives set out on the road immediately afterwards, calling
themselves Mrs Hank Williams, with bands, quite a tribute — nonetheless, Hank
had very few friends, and in the last few months of his life nobody would book
him, nobody would play in his band. Jack Ruby was one that stuck with him;
continued to book him, took him on trips. I believe they went to Cuba together.
I’d like to know more about that, that is something I might like to research
myself, just as a historical thing, Hank Williams in Havana.

QU: How long did your musical career last? You’re playing
some gigs on this tour, but you’re not playing so much.

KF: No. My career with the Texas Jewboys was almost exactly
as long as Hank Williams’ recording career, which was a little under four
years. Following that I toured with Bob Dylan and with Willie Nelson but that
was mostly without the band by that time. I think the really good music, the
good work is usually created by people who are under-appreciated at the time. It
makes me wonder about some of these guys like Tom Clancy or Stephen King or
Garth Brooks — they must, inside, be asking themselves, Am I really worth a
shit, if this many people like me? Do I really have much to say?

QU: What was it made you wind up that career?

KF: When ]oseph Heller said in the mid-70s that “They Ain’t
Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore” was his favourite country song, that was my
warning flag that I might not be a mainstream country artist. After that —
Damon Runyon said that all of life is six to five against. That’s basically it:
if there’s a way for people to misunderstand you, they will. Like my old friend
Doug Kenney, who started National Lampoon,
said, you’ve got to learn to roll with the bullets.

QU: What happened between the Jewboys and the books, which
didn’t appear until 1987?

KF: I was in a liberal arts programme at the University of
Texas, a highly advanced programme mainly distinguished by the fact that every
student in the programme had some form or other of facial tic. I graduated from
there, went on to the Peace Corps, and the 70s were big with the Jewboys. Late
70s the Jewboys were already on the wane, and the 80s was pretty much between
cases, as Sherlock Holmes would say. But it was out of that emptiness and that
unhappiness, I think, that I started writing. My first piece was for a magazine
called High Times, a drug magazine my
friend Ratso edited. It was called “My Scrotum Flew Tourist: A Personal
Odyssey”, about my Peace Corps experiences, and that was my first prose. Now I
think of myself more as a pointy-headed intellectual mystery writer, the
Raymond Chandler school of writer, though maybe that’s limiting, for him, or
me. . . I’m surprised that more of these clever writers in music don’t or can’t
write prose. When I was 43 I found out I could do it. There was a voice there,
I suppose.

QU: You named your hero after yourself, so I’m talking to a
character out of a book here. Do you have to walk around and be that character?

KF: That’s fatal. That’s what happened to a lot of people. I
think it happened to John Belushi, Iggy Pop — you have to be real careful with
that. You’ll die if you try to be a character. I’m very close to the Kinkster,
in the books, and most of the people in the books are pretty accurate, but
there is a casino of fiction and it’s a wonderful place, and often deals with
the truth, more often than the real world does. I often quote the old Turkish
proverb, “When you tell the truth, have one foot in the stirrups.” Because it’s
murder. But in fiction it isn’t.

Of course, I’ve been accused of not beating myself to death
inventing new characters, but why bother when you’ve got these guys? You’re
stuck with these old friends and as I’ve often said, you can pick your friends
and you can pick your nose, but you can’t wipe your friends off on your saddle.

QU: Do they mind being in the books? Was Chet Flippo pleased
with the picture of him in Lone Star?

KF: I think Chet now is pretty flattered to have passed into
fiction. You walk a close line when you’ve got a character that’s evil. I’ve
seen Chet since then anyway, he speaks to me. I spoke to the class he teaches
on writing in Tennessee, so he must be relatively ﬂattered to have passed into
the casino of fiction with Robin Hood and Sherlock and Ivanhoe.

QU: I read that something specific started you off on the
writing.

KF: Yeah, there was an incident in New York, in January ’83,
where I rescued a woman from a mugger in a bank in Greenwich Village. She was
being stabbed to death, it looked like to me, at least when I got into the
bank, so I held the guy, the assailant, until the police arrived and in the
morning there was a newspaper headline, “Country Singer Plucks Victim From
Mugger”. And the girl turned out to be Cathy Smith, the woman who’d been with
John Belushi when he died. She gave him the drugs. Well, she looked vaguely
familiar. See, I’d lived with Belushi for a while when I first came to New
York. I thought that was really weird, that out of 12 million people I would
rescue this one — not to tarnish my role as a hero at all, but that I would
rescue Cathy Smith. Tom Waits later commented that he thought that was the baby
Jesus telling me to stay away from drugs, which is possible also.

Anyway, I went home from that experience, the randomness of
it just blew me away, the whole thing, and I started writing the first book in
a Georges Simenon-like style, starting with just an address on the back of an
envelope and ﬂying by Jewish radar, never having written anything before. And
also Shel Silverstein helped, telling me, “Just write, ‘He said’, ‘She said’.
Keep it really ruthless.” That worked, for me, anyway. The voice seemed to be
there, and the characters I knew, and I loved mysteries.

I fancy myself as a sort of country-and-western Dorothy
Sayers. So it’s worked, particularly like in England, where the books are now
bestsellers, maybe because the British cherish eccentricity, I don’t quite know
why it is, but the Australians have now really picked up on it big, and I think
we’ll do well in New Zealand. Probably all that means the kiss of death in
America, but we’ll see. Americans may be coming around too — we're a little
slow out of the chute, to use a rodeo term.

QU: So you think you're a bigger star as a writer in England
than you are in America?

KF: No, we’re selling more books in America, because it’s
bigger. Remember Chandler was a bestseller in England, but he was not that big
in America until after his death. Elmore Leonard’s written how many, 60 novels?
Now somebody is finally making him a bestseller. ]ohn D MacDonald is another
great writer that went through that, and Rex Stout is another one, with Nero
Wolfe. All of those three guys are as literary and as great as the other kind
of authors that are lionised by the New
York Times, except we’ve always considered them mystery writers until very
recently.

QU: Who are your heroes in the crime-writing world?

KF: I like Robert B Parker. He and I are adult pen pals — he
commented that anybody who dots their i with a Star of David can’t be all bad.
I like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, of course, and I like Reginald Hill
and Colin Dexter. I like those British guys, and I don’t go for too many of the
smart-ass American types like myself. Chandler once said that the business of
fiction is to re-create the illusion of life, which is a rather laborious way
of saying, you forget you’re reading a book. Dick Francis does it well. Dick
Francis is a guy who doesn’t have a great deal of lyrical talent, his books are
formulaic almost, one after another, they’re pretty dry, but somewhere in there
you forget that you’re reading a book, and this is his genius.

The really good writers, Chandler, Fitzgerald, Hemingway,
Crumley, don’t write too much, they’re not real prolific. Elmore Leonard, he’s
a real pro. He’s pretty even. It’s almost incredible how long Elmore Leonard
was regarded as a pulp kind of guy. It goes back to what F Scott said: if you
write one book, you’ve written one book. If you write two books, you’re an
author. And to that I always add, if you write three books, you’re a hack.

QU: There are six Kinky novels all set in the Greenwich
Village, but the new book is going to be set in Texas.

KF: It is. Tragic mistake on my part. [Lights another
cigar.] You never take the detective out of his milieu. I hoped we could
conduct this interview without using the word milieu, or genre, but, it’s
happened.

Simon & Schuster, I signed a three-book deal with them
and they said, do two mystery novels and a, ah, real book. Forget the Kinky
stuff and the mystery stuff, and really stretch, let’s try and write a really
great novel. But Elvis, Jesus And
Coca-Cola, the first one, has done so well that now they’ve said, forget
the real book, stay with the Kinky thing. Moving to Texas was a device at the
time we thought might widen the audience, before we realised that the book was
doing real well.

When I moved to Simon & Schuster from my first publisher
the sales jumped about eight times over, it became very close to being a
bestseller in America. It would have been if they’d printed enough books — one
of those deals. Catch-22 was never a
bestseller. Sold 20 million copies, has never been a bestseller. .

An author is probably the worst person to ask certain
questions of. I’ll just point out Conan Doyle’s belief that The White Company was his great
masterpiece that the world would long remember him for. We all know that seven
people in New Zealand have read it, if that many, and seven people in North
America: that’s about it. And likewise Heller thinks that Something Happened is his great work. Bob Dylan probably has no
sense of what he’s done. So all I can do is look back down the hill and I’m
amazed that I have six books out and Armadillos
and Old Lace coming out of the chute. I think the books are getting better,
which is good, and I’m not that tired of the Kinkster where I have to kill him
off yet. When it happens it’ll be a little uncomfortable. I’m very close to the
character.

QU: I’m amazed at how you keep going.

KF: I have a brilliant pharmacist.

QU: I think I’ve just about used up my questions.

KF: And I’m fresh out of charm, Nigel, so it works out very
nicely. You’re a fine New

Zealander. I’ll give you a good-luck guitar plectrum. Did
you get one? Have two.

So here is Kinky Friedman in Dublin in 2003 performing Joseph
Heller’s favourite country song, “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Any More”: